And Jack couldn’t have been prouder of her if she’d been his own daughter.
His heart was bounding in his chest as he lowered his hand. His mouth had gone dry. “Jesus, David! Are we recording this? Are we recording?”
“Of course, Jack.” The voice, calm and unhurried, was that of Carter, David’s AI secretary, which in turn was running as one part of the much more powerful Dejah Thoris.
“Get Teri and Paul in here, stat,” David added.
“They are already on the way,” Carter replied.
Jack leaned back and looked around the compartment, trying to get his mental bearings after the other-worldly shock of proven FTL communications. They were in the relatively cramped quarters that had been set up in the shadow of the famous Cydonian Face. One entire wall was occupied by a flatscreen, on which was displayed the image from a robotic drone’s cameras inside the vast, hollow cavern beneath the Face known as the Cave of Wonders. That chamber was still in the chill, near-vacuum of the ambient Martian atmosphere; the research facility had been set up in a small, sealed hab on the surface so that the scientists studying the Cave of Wonders didn’t have to spend all of their time in pressurized Marsuits.
He still found it hard to believe that this was happening. He looked back at the screen, which showed just one of the thousands of displays available in the Cave of Wonders. Most of those displays were blank, but a few precious hundreds appeared to show landscapes set on other worlds around other stars.
Worlds around other stars…
And now they’d just proven that David Alexander had been right. The images displayed in the Cave of Wonders were wonderful indeed. They were real time—traveling instantaneously across the light years.
David was uttering something rapidly under his breath.
“What’s that?” Jack asked.
“Faster-than-light communication!” David shook his head slowly, his eyes locked on the monitor. “It’s true! It’s really honest-to-God true!”
“David, you’re the one who guessed that that’s what it was,” Jack reminded him. “And you’re the one who suggested the spectral analyses to prove that that is a view coming from a planet at Alpha Centauri. And you’re surprised?”
“Jack, when you get to be as old as I am, you’ll know there’s a big difference between a carefully thought-out hypothesis and the reality. And it isn’t always you get to feel the pound of stepping from one to the other!”
David Alexander didn’t look much over fifty, and Jack had to remind himself that the man was in his seventies. When he pulled his wise-old-codger routine, as he called it, it could be a bit disconcerting until you realized that he was of the so-called Millennial Generation, one of the people born within ten years of the dawning of the twenty-first century—and the first generation to have the effects of TBEs and other anti-aging drugs begin to show their effects. His experience didn’t seem to match his face.
“Well,” Jack said, “you’d better get used to it. This is going to win you the Nobel prize for sure!”
“Maybe.” He shrugged. “A lot of other people were in on this.” A grin split his face. “But goddamn, it’s gonna be fun to toss this little grenade into the physicists’ camp! They all claimed this level of quantum data coupling wasn’t possible! But we’ve ambushed ’em this time, by God!”
Jack smiled at David’s militaristic imagery. David Alexander was one of the most important, most hero-worshipped famous of all modern xenotechnoarcheologists—the man who’d defined the field with his original work at Cydonia twenty-five years earlier. But, sometimes, it seemed that he was prouder, personally, to have been one of a handful of civilians who’d been with the Marines on Garroway’s March. Not many civilians were accorded the status of honorary Marine; David Alexander had earned it, though…and reveled in it still.
“David?” Dr. Teri Sullivan, David’s wife, walked into the room. Their son, Paul, was close behind. “Carter said you had something exciting to tell us.”
“Yeah, so, whatcha got?” Paul asked. He was twenty-four, a student, working on his Ph.D. at the Columbia xe-noarcheological doctorate program. David had managed to wangle a position for him here in his third-year experiential education externship.
David gestured at the screen, where the robot regarded them dispassionately. “Hello, Dr. Sullivan,” the machine said. “I do not recognize the person with you, but calculate a 70-percent-plus probability that this is Paul.”
“Why, of course it’s—” She stopped, blushing. “Oh, it has been a while since you’ve seen him, hasn’t it?”